The telephone has greatly facilitated communications between parties, especially when great distances separate the parties. Metropolitan cities and suburbs typically have sufficient access to a public switched telecommunications/telephone network (PSTN) which is typically accessed by plain old telephone system (POTS) devices, as well as cellular networks which are accessible by cellular telephones. In many cases, cellular networks utilize digital signaling to provide enhanced features to users of cellular telephones. These enhanced features may include caller identification (“caller ID”) for displaying name and/or number information, digital voice mail services for saving and retrieving messages, and customized ring tones which may be assigned to all incoming calls or a specified callers. Users of modern cellular telephones may add to a collection of customized ring tones by utilizing cellular networks to download them from an external network, such as the Internet.
However, in many instances, cellular telephone owners do not have access to the enhanced features provided by cellular networks on jointly owned POTS devices (even when some of these features are also offered by the PSTN) due to the fact that older or legacy POTS devices are incompatible with the signaling required to provide these features or due to the fact that cellular phone owners may not wish to pay an additional cost to have these features provided by the PSTN. Thus, many subscribers of both PSTN and cellular networks are forced to utilize their cellular telephones when access to enhanced features is desired, as there is currently no method for sharing these features with POTS devices.